Under the Umbrella ✓

-27-

Elliot held Aria’s eyes for a very long time but he didn’t move any closer, as if he didn’t want to trespass the walls she had visibly made around her.

She didn’t know up to how much he had heard but she wasn’t going to wait for the probes. “I have to go now,” she emptily said.

He didn’t say anything and she wasn’t really expecting him to either. She brushed past him towards the living room to get her bag and leave but she wasn’t sure if she was heading straight to her house. Even the thought that she was slightly considering going anywhere else other than to her house made her realize that Hailey was right. She was always trying to run away whenever they needed her the most.

“Wait,” she heard him say before she could grab her bag. She glanced back at him. “Give me a minute.”

He lugged his feet to what she assumed was his bedroom and she waited for him, her mind thoughtless and silent after a long time. She just felt too hollow and tired. She wanted to sleep and wake up to a new reality.

She hadn’t wondered about why Elliot had asked her to wait but when he returned with the black umbrella in his hand, she stared at it in irony.

Aria couldn’t even be startled any longer. It seemed that she brought the rain with her woe recently, one misfortune triggering after another whenever it began for a day. “You think it’s going to rain now?” the petite hopeful side of her asked anyway.

For a second there she thought he was about to take the gesture back because he seemed conflicted. She couldn’t understand why else he’d give it to her. “You look like you will rain any moment. In case you want to hide.”

She couldn’t deny that she was taken aback by the movie-like phrase but she was enraged soon after, that being her common mood lately. She hated that he was being blunt about it. She hated that he was making her life look like it was someone else’s momentarily only to burst it like a bubble in a second.

Aria met his eyes ferociously, the peculiar color of them not flustering her anymore. Why she wanted to prove him otherwise, she couldn’t understand. She already knew how she appeared like in his eyes. She was realizing what he probably saw in her the moment he decided to approach her all those days back.

“I don’t know,” he murmured to himself, heedless to her glower. His eyes seemed frantic as if he was losing time, but the rest of his face remained impassive. “Just return it to me when you see me again. You have to return it to me.”

He looked like a crazy person with those words that had no basis. She could tell there was something more, something important that had been implicit between them since the very beginning. Aria was still insistent on containing herself from going after answers that should have been the least of her worries for now. No, she didn’t even want to make anything out of it. But her eyes were still irefully on him. She couldn’t bring herself to talk, because his words had managed to be the truth; she felt like she really would cry at the smallest spoken insinuation of her despair.

“If you want to do it outside, take this.” He didn’t look at her as he extended the umbrella towards her like he felt awkward from the situation that he pointed out. “I don’t want anyone seeing you like this.”

“Because it looks pathetic?”

He met her eyes immediately with those first words she uttered in between all her hopeless glares. She could see the commotion in his eyes, as if he thought he had said the wrong words, but she knew they weren’t, no matter how much she wanted to contradict it. 

“Because…” He hesitated. He looked baffled, struggling to say something seemingly right until his eyes unexpectedly flared in determination and he let out an even, decisive breath. “Because I want to be the only person to see this side. So if you want to cry, let me stay by your side.”

Aria’s lips parted in incredulity.  He really was being ridiculous, and funnily, she saw it coming. Why would he hold this out to someone who was practically a stranger? Why did he want to know her all of a sudden? Every time she saw the indication of him trying to get a little more personal she felt as if there was something he knew about her that she hadn’t told him herself. He acted like he had known her before they actually first met, which couldn’t be a possibility. Life wasn’t a movie and she didn’t catch the sweeter side of clichés.

While her mind had voiced all of this, she didn’t know why she felt what she felt right now. She had no name for it. She had been forcing herself to fight the distress. She had been hiding over and over again, trying to keep everything to herself, never truly depending on someone to wipe her tears away, particularly because at a certain point in her life, no one ever turned up for her on time.

Although Elliot was never by her side during those days, he had somehow begun to appear right at those moments out of the blue. He was there to witness the cracks in her demeanor even if she hadn’t broken down in front of him. No one had ever been there to tell her that she would be watched over to cry. No one had ever offered to be the only person.

But he was still an odd stranger and it was what she wanted him to be. “I… I’m fine.” Tears foolishly gathered in her eyes anyway. “I…” She tried to repeat it, mostly to assure herself, but her voice rebelled against lying any longer. Despite trying to hold herself together, she felt her cheeks dampen from the treacherous tears.

Not now. Not in front of him. She swept at her tears irritably but then dropped her face into her hands in defeat when she realized more of it fell in unwavering stubbornness. “This- I just…”

She had no idea what she was trying to say but since it had already started, she didn’t know how to stop. She had lost all of the awareness around her as broken sobs raked over her body but the next thing she knew, she was engulfed into Elliot’s arms.

Maybe it was the doing of the welcoming warmth that seemed to consume the iciness of her reality because she couldn’t seem to refuse the gesture but as she cried into his chest like there was no tomorrow, she realized it was the one thing she had ever wanted since everything had gone wrong in her life.

“I don’t know anymore,” she mumbled incoherently to herself in between her heaving sobs.

She didn’t know what she had to do, but whatever it was that she was doing now… she didn’t think she had the strength to do it anymore.